1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to electronic devices and systems that display images and animation from digital data. More particularly, the present invention generally relates to systems that display vector graphics.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
Vector graphics has revolutionized the display of images and video on computer hardware. The ability to generate more compact image data as a set of vectors using different authoring tools (in particular, to convert images from a raster scan-type data format into a set of vectors) has allowed images and video to be more efficiently transmitted over the interne. Recent refinements to vector graphics implementations have further enabled video to be transmitted to and displayed on handheld electronic devices, such as cell phones.
One such refinement to vector graphics is tessellation, or the decomposition of an image into a set of triangles. Virtually any image can be tessellated, which not only provides for efficient transmission and storage of images and video, but also provides for rapid display, depending on the display hardware.
A general problem with displaying vector graphics is that the resulting images may have “jagged” edges. Different related art anti-aliasing methods are used to address the problem of jagged edges. The most well known related art method is called “full screen anti-aliasing” (FSAA), which processes the resulting image as a whole. FSAA is computationally expensive, and is thus generally not feasible to implement on electronic devices with limited computational power, such as handheld devices. Further, the resulting quality of FSAA is limited (typically 4-8 levels of anti-aliasing). Other related art edge anti-aliasing techniques exist, which are generally more computationally efficient than FSAA. However, a well known problem of related art edge anti-aliasing techniques is that it is generally impossible to achieve “seamless stitching” between adjacent polygons when the polygons are processed and rendered separately and independently. Because related art edge anti-aliasing techniques render polygons separately, the resulting polygons typically have “seams” between them, which reduces the quality of the image.
Accordingly, what is needed is a system and method for edge anti-aliasing in vector graphics, such as tessellated vector graphics, which is computationally efficient yet mitigates the problems of jagged edges and seams between polygons.